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Edwin Hayward

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Edwin Hayward

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I have been involved in the domain name industry since 1996, when I founded iGoldrush.com, the first website to focus on educating consumers about domain names. Although I sold that site in 2000, I have maintained my focus on domain names and have been invited to speak on panels at various domain-related conferences.

It's worth noting that 157 articles were posted to YouMoz in 2010 and only 1 got a worse rating than this one (thumbs up to thumbs down ratio). That's pretty clear-cut, damning evidence! The author has done himself no favours...

Yes, that's a very good point. If you're competing with dozens or hundreds of companies in a particular niche or market, if you've secured THE most obvious domain name for that market, you'll start to be perceived as the incumbent, the leader within that market - especially for potential customers who are not already intimately familiar with the background/history of all the companies competing within that space. A great way to get a leg up on the nominal market leader.

Again, though, it's been my observation that in general most SEO and ad management firms are extraordinarily reluctant to suggest an EMD strategy to their clients, perhaps because of a fear of having to add a potentially costly "line item" to the initial bill. Of course, if you were to take a more cynical view of the issue, it's equally possible that they avoid advocating such a strategy because they bill on a percentage of spend basis - and anything that dramatically impacts that will have a knock-on effect on their bottom line.

From conversations I've had at conferences and tradeshows, it's clearly also be seen by some within the industry as somehow beneath them - a kind of "cheater's approach to SEO" - because there's no skill required beyond pinpointing the perfect domain name and securing it for the client, unlike the constant battle to stay ahead of the twists and turns of Google's ever-changing algorithm.

Anyway, if you're currently engaging an SEO or PPC management firm and spending a decent amount of money with them and they're not talking EMDs, then ask them why not! They're making you look like a fool by turning their backs on an obvious silver bullet, after all... and you're nominally paying them for their expertise.

On reflection, I would go even further: given that it's the end of 2010 not 1999, any SEO or PPC management company worth its salt MUST be recommending an exact-match domain strategy as part of its portfolio of services to any medium/large companies.

For a firm spending $x,xxx a month on PPC or more, for example, the payback in ROI terms of securing the exact-match domain to their busiest/most expensive keyphrase can be very, very short indeed, since clicks will go up and costs will come down the second they switch out the old URL and switch in the new, exact-match one. All that's needed is a new landing page or mini-site on the new domain - keep the rest of the campaign the same, and the exact-match boost I highlighted in the white paper linked in my previous post should do the rest.

So if you're in the SEO or ad management business and you're dismissing exact match domains as part of the panoply of strategies you offer your clients, shame on you! It's time to pull your head out of the sand, and realise that you're not providing the optimum service you could be.

How else could your clients make a one-time investment that starts paying off instantly, yet also delivers ongoing, sustained returns?

Exact match domains are easier to SEO because they contain (and always will contain, no matter what Google and the other search engines tweak) the most relevant keywords within the URL itself. That means that if ACME Enterprises sells gym shoes, then if they set up their site on gymshoes.com or gymshoes.cctld (most relevant cctld to their target market) then even if people link into that site using the link text "ACME Enterprises", their target keyphrase (gym shoes) is "baked" right into the URL. In other words, 100% of incoming links to their site will incorporate "gym shoes" as part of the linking code. And if somebody links to them using the anchor text "gym shoes" well, they've just doubled their keyword relevance for that link.

I also proved via a meticulous and widely-quoted case study that all other things being equal, exact match domains will get a higher CTR when used for Adwords ads than non-exacts will. Rather than regurgitate the whole thing here, you can find it complete with stats and diagrams at http://www.memorabledomains.co.uk/ppc-generic-domains.html

Remember, all the major search engines bold the keywords in the URL that match the search terms. So an exact match domain name will "light up" fully since all the keywords within it are the same as the keywords in that search phrase. This has been proven to boost CTR (on Adwords, as my case study showed) but also in the organic search results and is a completely natural result of "user psychology" i.e. people are looking for something relevant or at the very least something that catches their attention in the morass of search results (the average searcher "satisfices" in that they take no more than a few seconds to choose a search result to visit, unlike an SEO expert for example who might spend 10 minutes analysing each of the top 10 results!)

Add to that the unquantifiable but undeniably real advantage of "memorability" i.e. exact match domains are easier to remember because they fit 100% to the searcher's intent i.e. to their train of thought at search time (this memorability comes into play anywhere that the domain name is advertised off-line as well) and the exact match domain comes out as a winner on so many levels.

The only negative - and there's just the one - is that they're generally unavailable, unless forward-thinking companies are willing to open their pockets and buy them on the secondary market. But have you tried looking for prime commercial real estate recently? Found any going "spare"? Thought not...

A case study I did proved that exact match domains used in PPC ads get a higher CTR than other types of domains IN THE SAME ADS. This means that if you're doing PPC, securing the appropriate exact-match domain will bring you higher traffic at a lower cost per click - depending on your current PPC spend, your ROI might be positive almost instantly!

While Google has sadly since changed the way adgroups work so that you can no longer repeat the study the way I had it set up, you can find all the details in my writeup.

Remember: this is for PPC and is based 100% on user behaviour (the exact match domain prompted more clicks) so no matter how Google plays with the organic search algorithm, this benefit is very unlikely to change.

" Furthermore most strong brands dont include their target keywords in their name."

You've got cause and effect reversed here. Strong brands aren't strong because they don't include their target keywords, they're strong because they are STRONG. If brand A wasn't the strongest, then brand B or brand C would be - by definition, SOME brand has to be the strongest...

And if you're starting from the viewpoint of looking at brands (which almost by definition are not generic) then of course you're going to find that the strongest brands don't rely on keywords. But that's because you only chose to look at brands, and furthermore to look at them backwards.

A real-world parallel: if you consider only the finalists of the Olympic men's 100m race, you'll find that the top runners can run amazingly fast - but you can't (= shouldn't) infer anything from that about the running ability of a typical man, since you started by considering a field made up entirely of top Olympians!

Why are Google, Facebook and Twitter for example such strong brands despite the lack of keywords in their domain names? Because you've started reading from the very top of the short list of top brands, without considering all the millions of failed brands that withered and died further down the success pyramid.

One reason that search engines use exact-match domains in their ranking algorithm is that they are a strong signal of quality, especially as the competitiveness of the keyphrase increases.

If you consider a highly commercial 2-word keyphrase, then the likelihood of being able to waltz in off the street in 2010 and register the matching domain name in .com or the relevant local cctld from scratch is exactly zero! Even if you move up to 3-word or even 4-word keyphrases, if they get significant search volume and are the "niche killer" phrase for their little niche, they're going to have been registered long, long ago...

... and that therefore means that any site built on such a domain name is the equivalent of a real-world development built on prime commercial land. Without even caring about what the content of the site is, the search engine algorithm "knows" that the company that's building a site on keyword1keyword2.com domain (where "keyword1 keyword2" is the most lucrative phrase for that particular product, service or industry niche) either A) had the foresight to register the domain name many, many years ago or B) had to shell out big bucks for the domain name.

The "better" the domain name (read: the more commercial the keyphrase it contains) the higher its value on the open market becomes, and therefore the mere fact that a site is built on such a valuable domain name by implication adds value to the site.

If I had enough money I could go and buy a piece of land in the very heart of the commercial district of a large city. And even if I opened a fairly lousy shop on that land, I'd be assured of sales simply by virtue of the shop's location.

Or I could spend significantly less and buy a piece of land in the suburbs, with little passing foot-traffic. And even if I opened a magnificent store, I would have to spend a fortune on advertising to bring in the customers.

The above is so self-evidently matter-of-fact that nobody raises an eyebrow at it in the offline world. It's the reality faced by millions of businesses every day: location, location, location!

So you can "prove" to the search engines that your site "deserves" to rank above its competitors by virtue of its gripping content, fabulous photos and entertaining videos that bring your visitors coming back again and again. Or you can "prove" that it's worthy of consideration by building on a domain name that inherently is worth a large amount of money. Both are "hard" hurdles to leap, even if they're different kinds of hurdles - and jumping either one proves that your site is worthy of consideration.

And if you have deep enough pockets to afford both the premium domain name AND the premium site, then you start to see that in SEO terms at least, 1+1 can equal 3!